Semiconductor component manufacturers are constantly striving to increase the functionality and performance of their products, while decreasing their cost of manufacture. One approach for increasing functionality and performance has been to increase the number of circuit elements manufactured from a semiconductor wafer. As those skilled in the art are aware, a semiconductor wafer is divided into a plurality of areas or regions called chips or dice. Identical circuit elements are manufactured in each chip. Increasing the number of chips in a semiconductor wafer lowers the cost of manufacturing semiconductor components. However, a drawback with integrating a larger number of circuit elements in a semiconductor wafer is that it increases the area occupied by each chip and thereby decreases the number of chips that can be manufactured from a single semiconductor wafer. Integrating passive circuit elements with active circuit elements further increases the chip size because they occupy a larger area than active devices. Thus, in lowering manufacturing costs semiconductor component manufacturers trade-off the number of circuit elements that can be manufactured in a chip with the number of chips that can be obtained from a semiconductor wafer.
Another drawback with monolithically integrating passive and active circuit elements in a semiconductor chip is that the tools for manufacturing passive circuit elements are optimized for manufacturing larger geometry devices whereas the tools for manufacturing active circuit elements are optimized for manufacturing smaller geometry devices. For example, equipment used in the manufacture of passive circuit elements is precise to within a tenth of a micron whereas equipment used for manufacturing active circuit elements is precise to within a thousandth of a micron.
Thus, it would be advantageous to have a method for manufacturing passive and active circuit elements in a semiconductor chip that is area and cost efficient. It would be of further advantage to be able to use common equipment or toolsets for manufacturing passive and active circuit elements.